Understanding Enterprise Cloud Applications Better

‘Moving to the cloud’, ‘Running in the cloud’, ‘Stored in the cloud’, and ‘Accessed from the cloud’ are some everyday phrases used by top executives, which tell us that IT is transforming “in-the-cloud”.

Due to the growing consumption of enterprise cloud applications, plenty of terms, topics and definitions are yet believed to be amorphous among architects, developers, and business people.

This article will ease your task to remember the terms by drawing analogies for cloud application terms in the context of everyday objects and situations.

Cloud Application

To begin with the essentials, let’s understand the term cloud application or cloud app.

A cloud app is usually hosted to perform a specific function for a user or a program that combines many of characteristics of web and desktop applications. The advantages of working with cloud apps are many as they are responsive, allow you to manage work offline, and don’t take up space on user's computer, tablet or mobile/smartphone.

Originally, cloud apps would come and go performing several different functions—from sharing and accessing information to accomplish tasks and more—just as weather clouds would extend over the sky, sometimes offering shade and many other times quenching land’s thirst with its ‘rain’ service.

Cloud Application Performance Management (CAPM)

The CAPM or cloud APM acts as a keeper for organizations deployed with cloud apps. The work of CAPM is to supervise and ensure cloud apps and the resources they run on are in good order. It assists in keeping all the cloud users happy by identifying a poor user experience, optimizing application availability and uptime whenever required.

CAPM consists of tools to monitor application response times and amasses the information into a correlation engine and dashboard. Thereafter, IT departments can then deal with any issues, whether new or repetitive. In here, one can consider CAPM like man's best friend—the tools do not perform all the exact same tasks. Whereas some tools have the added ability to predict where problems may arise while, some are powered to automate a solution for an existing problem in its range of performance.

Virtual private cloud (VPC)

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) technically is the logical division of a service provider's public cloud when a private cloud exists on a provider's public cloud architecture. The public cloud remains multi-tenant with added more security for customers. Data moving between the customer’s enterprise and the cloud provider is secured through encryption, tunneling, private IP addresses or allotting a virtual LAN to every customer.

Application Migration

As we all understand, immigration involves long lines and probing questions, including irrelevant ones but you answer it. And that's just if you leave politics out of it. Leaving one country behind for another and application migration are pretty much similar—both aren’t so easy. Application migration involves the transfer of an application from one environment to another—mostly, application migration is from on-premises servers to the cloud or between the clouds.

Application migration can be tough; it may differ if there is any difference in hosting platforms. In the case of people would have a learning curve in a new country regardless of how much they prepare ahead of time. Though cloud-to-cloud migrations are considered easier than migration from on-premises to the clouds, even cloud vendors have their own unique, exceptional ways of operation that makes the cloud-to-cloud migration a tedious job.

OASIS Cloud Application Management for Platforms (OASIS CAMP)

OASIS stands for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and CAMP was added to this group for the development of a universal application program interface. That application interface would ease the task for companies that leverage the cloud to work in different environments.

Today, it specifically seeks improvement on how cloud environments interact and to simplify the management of cloud applications. Additionally, the CAMP standard helps organizations with application migration, among other tasks.